SCO Claims Ownership of ELF To Court 227
l2718 writes "In the most recent punch-counterpunch of the SCO v. IBM case, IBM is claiming that SCO is trying to vastly expand their claims beyond what they alleged in their list of material allegedly misused by IBM filed last December, using their expert reports. For example, two years ago we covered SCO's claim to own ELF, the main executable format of Linux. Apparently they are have finally made the same claim to a court of law, after the deadline for making such claims. From IBM's memorandum: 'The final disclosures identify 19 Linux files relating to the ELF specification, as well as excerpts from several specification documents. Dr. Cargill far exceeds this claims ... asserting infringement of the entire ELF format ... also ... for the first time, claims to the ELF magic number.'"
They just don't give up. (Score:5, Informative)
Who was this TIS Committee that dared give away SCO's property?! Why, SCO themselves. Err, actually [x86.org], it was Absoft, Autodesk, Borland International
Corporation, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Lahey, Lotus Corporation, MetaWare
Corporation, Microtec Research, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Corporation, The Santa Cruz
Operation, and WATCOM International Corporation. Considering the number of companies that ownership was split across, one has to wonder: Did SCO ask permission from their partners before filing suit over technology that they (nee, Taratala) only helped develop?
Darl is getting incredibly desperate, don't you think? Anything to keep from losing the company under his feet, I guess.
Re:Oh come on! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Magic Number? (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, it's a special number that appears at the beginning of an ELF executable. It allows the ELF executable to be distinguished from other executable formats, such as (obsolete) a.out, shell scripts, etc. It's important because Unix has no naming convention for executable files that it could otherwise use to figure out how a particular executable needs to be run.
ELF experts, did I get this right?
Re:Magic Number? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Magic Number? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Quoting a certain SciFi flick (was:Play By Play (Score:5, Informative)
SCO is barely in business. This last quarter it had revenues of just over $7 million compared to revenues of over $9 million for the same quarter last year. Losses for the quarter topped $4 million or $0.22 per share. If it hadn't been for Sun and Microsoft paying some dubious "licensing fees" at the beginning of the case and a completely wacky PIPE deal set up by some Microsoft executives SCO would have been forced to close its doors years ago. No one is the slightest bit interested in SCO's UNIX business these days.
Interestingly enough, if Caldera hadn't changed its name to SCO and followed its current course it is very likely that it would be benefitting from the current pro-Linux climate. Linux companies are making money these days, and Caldera was well situated to profit from a Linux upturn.
Re:Magic Number? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The solution... (Score:2, Informative)
As *the* former Novell/USG employee... (Score:5, Informative)
I received verbal permission for making the contents of the archive available from USL's representative to TIS prior to the mirroring. I specificallly called on the phone for this, even though it was a publically acessible FTP site, just to be sure.
This can be corraborated by Daren Davis, a former Univel then Novell/USG then Caldera employee, and by others who worked at Novell at the time (Jim Freeman knew about the archive, as did Dan Grice, Ron Holt, Bryan Cardoza, and a number of others, some of whom ended up involved with Caldera, and some who didn't).
The orginal 1.0 ELF specification came primarily out of work by engineers at Intel. The 1.2 specification, which *did* have significant work done by USL, was done under the auspices of TIS, with the *explicit* understanding that the result would be available as an ABI standard for all.
ftp://ftp.digibd.com/ [digibd.com] USA GMT -6 25-Jan-95 belal@sco.com (Bela Lubkin> {posting}
DigiBoard
keng@digibd.com
Server : http://www.digibd.com/ [digibd.com]
Files : Digiboard (digifax, digiline: drivers, isdn); pub: HP4laser (lp
model for autohandling of PCL/PostScript jobs), SCO-ports,
uiarchive (archive of the defunct Unix International effort),
unixware, WWW
Note that this is just an excerpt from a Usenet posting for the site listing for the site - the mirroring occurred in early 1994 (January, if I remember correctly), and the UI servers were defunct as of Mar 1994, when the mailing list archives were moved over. Novell acquired USL from AT&T in Jun 1994.
An ironic, IMO, thing to note in the posting above is that the location of the archive is being disseminated by an SCO (the real SCO) employee.
-- Terry
Re:Quoting a certain SciFi flick (was:Play By Play (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Remember that Caldera was the first Linux to try to foist per-seat licenses [slashdot.org] in their distro.
When you have no or very little competition, something like that can work, but when you have many, many other vendors selling the exact same thing, the last thing you do is try to differentiate yourself by making your offering worse than your competitors.
Re:SCO Forum (Score:1, Informative)
Platinum Sponsor
SCO and HP have been partners in leading edge technology since the mid-1980s, when most PCs were single-task, single-user systems and the term "server" was unknown.
The HP/SCO partnership harnessed the latent power of microcomputers with SCO UNIX to bring mainframe and minicomputer capabilities like multi-user and multi-tasking to the desktop.
Gold Sponsor
SCO and MySQL AB have teamed to create the ideal applications platform SMB and replicated/branch enterprise computing environments. With SCO and MySQL, you gain the competitive advantages offered by both open standards and open source.
Is it time to tell HP and MySQL how we feel about this?
Re:Magic Number? (Score:4, Informative)
...as did a lot of other UN*Xes before Linux even existed. The original a.out file format started with a 16-bit octal 0407, which, as I remember, was a PDP-11 jump around the rest of the executable image header, presumably because the entire executable file, header and all, was read into the address space; one of the exec-family calls would fail if it didn't see the 0407. Later, other magic numbers were added for executables that had a shared code segment and a non-shared data segment, and for executables where the code shared segment and shared data segment were in separate address spaces ("split I and D space"). That tradition was continued with a.out on other machines.
Eventually, some (ultimately most, if not all) UN*Xes also recognized "#!" as a magic number, meaning "read the rest of the line, and run the program specified there, with the optional argument specified there if present, and with the name of the script and the arguments to the exec call. Executable image formats other than a.out were given their own magic numbers, so the exec-family calls could know what format the file was.
It's a miracle! (Score:5, Informative)
While seagulls are optimized for ocean environments, have their breeding grounds there (so they really shouldn't vacation inland for more than 9 months or so), and tend to hang out there by preference, they do quite well on fresh-water lakes and land. A garbage dump is a banquet for them.
Like other soaring birds they get blown far inland by large storms from time to time - and may hang out there for weeks or months afterward if there's something (like food) to interest them.
Utah is a bit inland even for them, so they don't show up there TOO often. But there is one incident when they did, and it was very important.
Back when the Mormons were first out there, as with any bunch of new settlers trying to farm hostile land, their first crops were somewhat marginal. The spring of their first year the crops were beset by a local crop pest ("Mormon Crickets"), which was devouring whole fields.
Of course the Mormons prayed for assistance.
And suddenly a whole bunch of seaguls showed up (much to the surprise of the Mormons, who hadn't seen any in this place so far and knew how far they were from a seagul habitat).
The seagulls found the locusts, pigged out, and hung around until the locusts were pretty much gone and the crops saved.
This is the "Miracle of the Gulls" - the reason there is a monument to seagulls in Temple Square and why the California Seagull is the state bird of the Mormon-settled inland desert state of Utah.
Of course the story grew a bit over the years. My wife tells of the time, when she was a child and the family was visiting taking the Temple Square tour in Salt Lake City, they visited the monument. A small flock of seagulls had blown in and were hanging out around the monument, eating any dropped food and handouts from the tourists. The tour guide went into the spiel about the Miracle of the Gulls and how seagulls had never been seen in the area before or since - completely oblivious to the gulls wandering around, screeching, and squabbling over food in typical seagull style. B-)
("But Mommy..." pointing to the gulls all around. "Shhhhhh!" says mommy.)
Re:Oh come on! (Score:3, Informative)
The identifier is e_ident[0]: 0x7f, e_ident[1]: 0x45, e_ident[2]: 0x4c and e_ident[3]: 0x46. Endianess does not apply in this instance. Or phrase another way, if you have 0x4c467f45 then you don't have a (valid) ELF file or you're code is incorrectly accessing the structure.
Re:You forget... (Score:2, Informative)
2. The tSCOg vs. IBM lawsuit has now come down to contract violations only -- no patents, trademarks, or copyright claims by tSCOg have survived discovery -- let alone IBM's upcoming PSJs (see #1). This is the contract that tSCOg claims to be a party since they claim to be a successor in interest from AT&T through USL, Novell, and oldSCO. The same contract that Novel is claiming that they are violating (see #3).
3. Novell's counterclaims, including Lanham Act violations and the fact that *they*, and not tSCOg, by all evidence given so far, own the what few copyrights in UNIX that tSCOg claims IBM violated. Recall that Novell, under the original oldSCO contracts, also has the ability, which they used, to tell tSCOg to cease their claims against IBM -- which tSCOg ignored.
Recall that under the original Novell-oldSCO contract (with the original Santa Cruz Organization, not the current tSCOg knock-off), tSCOg collects royalties for Novell for all UNIX sales, for which tSCOg receives 5% as a collector's fee. Novell's counterclaims include the fact that tSCOg have not forwarded any monies they received from their SCOSource, or from the "UNIX license fees" they accepted from Microsoft and Sun. Nor did tSCOg allow Novell to review those new licenses so that they could accept or deny the terms, which was also their right under the original contract. Nor has tSCOg allowed Novell to audit the collection of fees for those licenses and tSCOg's other licensing collections to ascertain whether they fell under the terms of the original Novell-oldSCO contract.
Thus Novell is also asking the court to freeze $30 million in tSCOg's assets until the court can either determine whether tSCOg owes Novell for those licenses or forces tSCOg to allow Novell their audit rights enumerated in the original Novell-oldSCO contract.
Novell has also started an arbitration against tSCOg to counter tSCOg's claims that SUSE Linux, which Novell now owns, is violating tSCOg's UNIX copyrights by distributing Linux. This arbitration is based upon contracts made between tSCOg, SUSE, and may other members, including Red Hat, of the United Linux consortium whereby no member could sue any others over copyrights, patents, or trademarks contributed or used by any of the members. The same code base that Caldera and then tSCOg, as they renamed themselves, distributed under the GPL well after they began their litigations (see #5).
4. Among the defenses that IBM will use themselves, beyond proving that IBM made no copyright or contract violations with their contributions of their own code to Linux, are the same claims made by Novell (i.e. Novell and not tSCOg own the copyrights that tSCOg claims IBM violated, Novell told tSCOg to cease their claims against IBM, etc.).
5. Among the counterclaims IBM has made are Lanham Act violations by tSCOg and the claim that tSCOg has violated the GPL in how they themselves distributed Linux (this is also the basis for many of IBM's defenses, as well).
6. Red Hat has a lawsuit, currently stayed, whereby they claim Lanham Act violations by tSCOg.
I hope you can now see how intricately bound tSCOg has become in their own misdeeds and deceits.
Based upon the above, and much more, it is my opinion, for what it's worth (as IANAL), but which coincides with many others' opinions (including several ex-lawyers) on GrokLaw, tha